Collab is a group of design professionals and enthusiasts who support modern and contemporary design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Members experience great design year-round through exhibition previews, design-inspired field trips, special access to the Museum’s world-class design collection, lectures, and opportunities to meet and learn from design curators and visionaries.

Join Collab
Become a Collab member or buy a gift membership for a friend or family member who is passionate about design. Membership contributions fund Collab activities and support acquisitions, exhibitions, publications, and programs. Collab benefits include:

Programs and Events
Guided by its mission to create engaging experiences that educate and inspire, Collab brings you into the center of the design revolution. Events include previews and curator-led tours of exhibitions in the Collab Gallery in the Museum’s Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, lectures, publications, design-inspired field trips, the Student Design Competition, and our signature program, the prestigious annual Design Excellence Award.

Collab Design Excellence Award

Each year Collab presents the Design Excellence Award to a design professional or manufacturer whose impact on the field is inspirational. Past recipients have included Rolf Fehlbaum, Marc Newson, Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Zaha Hadid, Alberto Alessi, Marcel Wanders, and Frank O. Gehry.

The Student Design Competition

For more than twenty years the annual Collab Student Design Competition has been an exceptional opportunity for college students to network with peers, meet the global design leaders who are judging their work, and experience the rigor of competition. Their assignment: to design an object inspired by the work of that year’s Design Excellence Award recipient.

2016 Student Design Competition: For Kids Only

The 2016 Collab Student Design Competition took place on Monday, November 14, 2016. This annual
event is held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and provides a unique opportunity for regional university
design students to experience competition outside the classroom and to receive valuable feedback from
nationally recognized industry leaders.

Brief
Design an object (a toy, piece of furniture or combination of the two) for a
child, under the age of 10, which is predominantly made of a single material.
The material must be utilized in a non-traditional, unexpected manner.

The habitat was inspired by observing how people interact with nature and open parks.
In the urban environment plants do not occupy as much space as they should. With so many chemicals in the air, people need a place that they can go to take a breath of fresh air.

About the 2015 Competition: Collab held its Twenty-Second Annual College Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 17, 2014. The competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Vitra—Design, Architecture, Communication: A European Project with American Roots. The 2014 Collab Design Excellence Award honoree and the inspiration for this year’s
Collab Student Design Competition, is Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra.

Quiet Creativity is a celebration of the powerful contributions quiet people bring to the workplace. This brand reflects my quiet nature, which allows for me to focus and be creative. I used hand drawn elements of the tools of a graphic designer in the logo to make up the shape of a brain to depict the idea of the brain in motion even when the mouth is still.

About the 2015 Competition: Collab held its Twenty-Third Annual College Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 16, 2015. The competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Work on What You Love: Bruce Mau Rethinking Design celebrating the work of branding and design visionary Bruce Mau – recipient of Collab’s 2015 Design Excellence Award.

First Place: Justin MartinSTABIL
University of the Arts, Industrial Design
Professor: Douglas Bucci

STABIL utilizes the latest in induction cooking technology to provide a social cooking experience for its users.

About the 2013 Competition: Collab held its Twenty-First Annual College Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 18, 2013. The competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Marc Newson: At Home celebrating one of the most acclaimed and influential designers of his generation – recipient of Collab’s 2013 Design Excellence Award.

First Place: Lou Stuber
Are We There Yet?!
Tyler School of Art/Temple University

The concept behind Are We There Yet?! is loosely based off of family road trips that I have experienced with my own family across the country. Things never seem to go exactly according to schedule when you are on a road trip. The object of the game is to end up at your final destination, Shallow Waters, with the most money left to enjoy your stay at the world’s best water park.

About the 2012 Competition: Collab held its Twentieth Annual College Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 19, 2012. The competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Double Portrait: Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Designers celebrating the innovative graphic design work of Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast—recipients of Collab’s 2012 Design Excellence Award.

About the 2011 Competition:
Collab held its Nineteenth Annual College Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 14, 2011. The competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion celebrating the innovative designs of Zaha
Hadid, the recipient of Collab’s 2011 Design Excellence Award.

First Place: James Read Hughes
Flow Series
University of the Arts
Industrial Design
Professors: Doug Bucci and Daniel Michalik

In this series of dipping plates for oil and vinegar, each porcelain dish is mass-producible and uses only one material. A humanistic and whimsical aspect is introduced into each design in the form of a relief at the plate’s bottom, which uses the natural properties of each liquid to create a sublime pattern that reveals itself during use.

About the 2010 Competition:
Collab held its Eighteenth Annual College Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 15, 2010. The competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Alessi: Ethical and Radical celebrating the innovative products of the Italian manufacturer, Alberto Alessi - recipient of Collab’s 2010 Design Excellence Award.

About the 2009 Competition:
Collab held its Seventeenth Annual Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 16, 2009. This year’s competition was held in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Marcel Wanders: Daydreams celebrating the innovative design work of the Dutch designer, the recipient of Collab’s 2009 Design Excellence Award.

First Place Winner: Jesse Gerard
The University of the Arts
Industrial Design
Professor: Dan Michalik

The layered plywood technique widely associated with Frank Gehry is adapted to design and produce the Lewis Bench.

About the 2008 Competition: Collab held its Sixteenth Annual Student Design Competition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, November 3, 2008, in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition, Frank O. Gehry: Design Process and the Lewis House, devoted to the architecture and design of Frank Gehry, Collab’s 2008 Design Excellence Award recipient. Students were asked to consider the way Frank Gehry experiments with forms and materials as part of his creative process.

No other household object is as emblematic of Modernist ideals as the chair. The chair can be mass-produced, sold globally, and is a subject of experimentation with technology and materials. These qualities are exhibited in a vast, white showroom, faithful to the Modernist ideology that an interior space should be "open and free-flowing." Upon entering the exhibit, the viewer was met with a large-scale banner showing line illustrations of chairs. The chairs were not arranged chronologically, but are grouped by similarity of line, demonstrating that development of chairs is about refinement and reinvention of pre-existing forms. The similarities existing between chairs created decades apart demonstrates the immense influence of Modernist techniques and ideals.

About the 2007 Competition: Collab’s Fifteenth Annual Student Competition, Mapping Modernism, was held in conjunction with the celebration of Collab's new gallery in the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building and its opening exhibition, Designing Modern: 1920 to the Present. This year, students were asked to consider the scope of the Modern Design dialogue.

The competition challenged students to design a "Map" that links associations between people, things, or events within the context of the revolutionary ideas and trends in art, architecture, and design that developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The map should communicate the student’s interpretation of the forces that flowed into, through and around modern design, giving shape to its origins and output.

Miho's project examines ornament in the tabletop context and celebrates Jensen's aesthetic through organic motif and structural pattern making. The bowl's hidden intelligence is the application of a unique electrostatic coating on the interior. This silvery heat-retaining material allows the bread to be kept warm long after the basket is moved from the oven to the table.

About the 2006 Competition: Collab's Fourteenth Annual Student Design Competition, The Intelligent Ornament, was part of a week-long series of events celebrating Collab's 2006 Design Excellence Award recipient, Georg Jensen and Georg Jensen, Inc. It posed the question: If Jensen were alive today, what objects might he be moved to create?

The competition challenged students to design a physical model and supporting presentation board for their “Intelligent Ornament.” A distinguished panel of judges used both in measuring the overall success of each entry.

First Place Winner: Brett Duncan
University of The Arts, Industrial Design
Professor Rama Korposh

Brett Duncan's Ice Bloom consisted of flowers frozen in a sphere of ice which blossom and expand as the ice around them melts. Also embedded in the ice sculpture are glass beads which become apparent as the ice melts and they drop sporadically onto the surface the vase melts on. The gentle, occasional sound produced by the dropping beads reminds us of the fleeting quality of the vase. Here, variance is produced in a temporal event which one of our judges likened to a performance.

About the 2005 Competition: The 2005 competition brief reflected the richness of Collab Design Excellence Award recipient Gaetano Pesce’s contribution to design through his unique approach. By combining elements of art, design, philosophy, and technology, Mr. Pesce has encouraged the wondrous and accidental, embracing imperfections as traits which enhance and humanize his work. Applying this philosophy to design for production has been referred to as “variance.”

Students interpreted this concept in their development of a full-scale functional prototype of a flower vase. Winning designs demonstrated variance in both philosophy and in manufacturing strategy.

Adam Johnson said of his redesign for the Bertoia Chair, "This lounge chair rises up out of the ground to suspend the human body in a minimalist redesign of a classic piece." Judges called this chair a "show-stopper" and a beautiful sculpture which allowed the viewer to fall into the visual comfort of the form.

Tie for First Place Winner: Stephen Cooke
University of The Arts, Industrial Design
Professors Patty Beirne and Rama Korposh

Stephen Cook said of his "Leaf Chair" that it "combines the discipline of the grid structure with the organic clustering of material at its midsection, coupling design with sculpture." The judges found it to be an interesting juxtaposition to the Bertoia Chair's sense of order with a random and casual sensibility. One of the judges compared the gesture of the seat to that of a wedding dress with a train cascading in its wake.

About the 2004 Competition: The 2004 Collab Design Excellence Award recipient was Florence Knoll-Bassett. This year’s theme reflected the rich history of Knoll International’s contribution to the language of design through it’s iconographic furniture. Collab provided several classic designs from the Knoll Studio line from which students chose as points of departure for their design explorations. Through research into material and technological innovations, students redesigned their chosen object for the future.

2004 Judges: Claudia Gould, Director, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; George H. Marcus, Assistant Professor, History of Art, the University of Pennsylvania; Jeff Miller, Founder and Principal, Jeff Miller Inc., and VP of Design, ECCO Design Inc., New York; Bill Shea, Founding Partner, Shea+Latone, Inc.; Stephan Copeland, Founder, the Copeland Studio.

2003: Main Exterior Signage for The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new Perelman Building acquisition

2002: Paper Lighting

2001: Designing The Design Excellence Award

2000: CD Box Set Packaging

1999: Clock for The New Milennium

1998: Shopping Bag for the Terrence Conran Home Furnishing Collection

1997: Ice Bucket for Starck/Schrager Mondrian Hotel

1996: Chair or Seating Unit for the Richard Meier Museum in Ulm, Germany

1995: Tea Kettle

1994: Lighting Fixture with Japanese Influence

1993: Dinnerware Place Setting

For more information, please contact Collab by phone at 215-763-7352 or by e-mail at .